The present disclosure relates to a method and system for calling desired contacts using a standalone portable device such as a smartphone. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, references will be made to examples of applications for making sales calls. However, one of ordinary skill in the art will understand that the concepts described herein are applicable to any number of different fields, including, but not limited to, any contact relationship management system, telephone surveys, telephone number verification, census information gathering activities, fund raising campaigns, political campaigns, or any combination thereof.
An automated system for telephonically calling desired prospects with a standalone portable device will involve calling attempts on separate successive sessions, which may be separated by a number of days, weeks, or in some cases, even months. An example of an automated system for facilitating telephone call connections between a user and a prospect is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2007/0121902 A1, published May 31, 2007, entitled TRANSFER OF LIVE CALLS, based upon application Ser. No. 11/556,301, filed Nov. 3, 2006, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Users such as sales people who make calls to prospects are heavy users of mobile telephones, especially smartphones that combine features of a cell phone with those of a computer. While smartphones provide many applications to help the sales person work more effectively, it is still challenging to use smartphones effectively to reach the right prospects with whom the sales person needs to contact. In addition, it is difficult for the sales person to make required and useful updates to the correct records in the contact database that is used by their company. It is time consuming to keep contact lists updated for both initial and follow up conversations, as smartphone user interfaces are not optimized for adding, updating and deleting the hundreds of frequently changing contacts typically needed to support outbound sales calls. Because of their small size, smart phones have limited area to devote to dialing keypads and keyboards, making manual dialing slower and more error prone than on a desk phone or desktop computer system.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved system and methods for facilitating the calling of desired contacts using portable devices such as smartphones. An automated system for updating the contacts database with the outcome of each conversation is also desired.
Customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems are typically used as master repositories for customer and prospect information. When using an automated calling process, the user has conversations with prospects that need to be correctly recorded in a CRM system, such as logging the call, setting a status field on the lead or contact record to indicate that at least one conversation has taken place, and creating a task record for follow up action. These updates need to be performed in a way that allows the user to mix automated calling sessions with unscheduled manual dialing and scheduled meetings in a coordinated way that avoids conflicts, such as calling a prospect back too early, or before an agreed-upon next step has been taken. While these updates can be performed manually by the user within the CRM system, when using a portable device such as a smartphone, it is more efficient and accurate to have the updates performed automatically.